And I think everyone owns a piece of that somewhere in their lives. My chair is mental illness, but I seldom write about it, or from it. Everyone has a chair, a tragedy of some sort, but it seems to me that it isn't the most interesting thing most of us have to comment upon. It's finding a way to discuss waiting in a checkout line behind an elderly person dripping in diamonds arguing about a 35 cent coupon in a new way, or being stuck next to a person who shit his pants on the Red Line which just broke down and there's no AC or any way out. Describing those un-extraodinary incidents to people is interesting. Making an anecdote into a commentary on the world at large is interesting

Tragedy is a very grand word, and a very grand concept, and it's all been done. The interest - I'd rather think of it as the echo point, where what you say as a writer or a storyteller bounces off me and resonates into something shared, where the story and the response come together - is in the honesty of it.

The rest of that stuff, it's mechanics. Honestly. erika's razor points are as sharp as they aren't there because she's stuck in that damned chair - they're there because she distills and sends it out a particular way. And the particular way she sends it out, it's going to make a lot of people uncomfortable, because it jars their echo points. But it's going to make a lot more people go "well fuck YES!"

You do the same thing; the only wrestle is with the mechanics. Your stuff hits echo points in me, and I've never fought in fandom or worked retail. It's right there.

So what's the problem? (edit: we're leaving for the day momentarily, so I'm not ducking or anything, or ignoring or anything. I'm just out getting olive oil.)

My problem is always the wrestling with arrogance. I'm never sure if what I'm writing is interesting or just navel-gazing, because I'm writing for my own amusement and not anyone else's. Sure, I want other people to read me, but that comes from the same place as wanting someone to join me for lunch. I'll tell you a story, and then you tell me one. It's a social exercise in that I want to talk to people through the keyboard, but I feel incredibly self-conscious that maybe I'm just talking AT people. Like a blowhard in a bar.

I have to learn to be a bigger whore, Allyson. Sometimes I'm very torn about that, because my life would be easier if I were a better liar. Because, yeah, the schmaltz market is huge and insatiable, and I do get tempted by the paydays sometimes. And it woiuld be easy for me to switch on my apple-polishing reflex again...I got A's in school and let strangers pat me and at one point was very good at giving people what they wanted to hear.

Can I ask you a personal question about the circus of jackholes, erika?

Tragedy too easily becomes self-involved dreck, like Prozac Nation.

I agree with you one hundred percent about this, and about how erika's writing is *not* that. With me, my mom has been chronically ill since I was a child, so there's a fascination with/curiosity about morbidity that has always informed the way I look at the world, but it's not necessarily the largest part.

Describing those un-extraodinary incidents to people is interesting. Making an anecdote into a commentary on the world at large is interesting.

This is exactly right, but I come from such a jaded place with regard to finding that audience, since a lot of today's publishing executives want to know what your "hook" or "platform" is.

Your stuff hits echo points in me, and I've never fought in fandom or worked retail. It's right there.

This is very true. I have worked retail, but fandom? Just here and the Beta, and at the tail end of the Whedonverse to boot. But Vampire People spoke to me on a lot of levels. And that's the thing -- sometimes it's not even so much what you write as the voice you use to tell your story. Yours is unique, and very relatable.

Yeah. Ask away.

Is it difficult to discern between people who are being nice to you because they're nice to everyone, and people who are nice to you because it makes them feel better?

I ask because I was thinking about this guy I went to college with who was blind. He was standing at a crosswalk, and I watched while I was trying to take a left. The cars kept whizzing by him. When I took my left I blocked the walk, got out of the car, and said, "you can cross now."

And it didn't really make me feel better. It just made me hate everyone else, more.

And then I thought about how people go out of their way to give you stuff, like the guy with the drawing when you came to visit. It seemed like that wasn't so much for you, but to make him feel like he did something nice for someone. And I wondered how often that happens, and if it makes it harder to separate out the genuine people from the clowns.

So if you had felt good would it have made you one of the clowns?

No, if I did it solely to make me feel good, or out of a sense of pity, it'd make me a clown. Blocking the crosswalk was about the student, not about me.

Yeah. It is hard, that's why I think a true friend is the one who'll confront me when I'm being stupid. That's why the whole Bitches kerfuffle thing confused me so much, because my experience with humoring is so...different from others' To me, that would mean that they didn't trust me enough to be honest, what she was asking... that we carefully consider every word. Doesn't mean I love being flamed, but empty praise is all too easy for me to get. Which is also hard when I send work out, am I talented, or Special?